Enlightenment abolitionist thinkers were not antiracist or anticolonial
Evidence
Such warnings developed out of a complex network of colonial administrators and Enlightenment intellectuals who came during the last decades of the eighteenth century to believe that slavery had to be reformed and ultimately eliminated. Such thinkers saw clearly that the daily resistance of slaves through poison, suicide, abortion, as well as marronage and revolt, and the violent response of the planters formed a cycle that had to be stopped before it spun out of control. They were not particularly antiracist, and certainly not anticolonialâMercierâs ideal world was one in which the wastefulness of slavery in the Americas had been replaced by an empire in which Africans grew sugarcane next to their own hutsâbut they believed that slavery should be gradually replaced by other forms of labor. Enlightenment critiques of slavery attacked the institution as a violation of the natural rights that all human beings shared, and the warnings of Mercier and Raynal suggested that, like all other oppressed peoples, the slaves had the right to resist their oppressors violently. â Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story ofâŠ, 211
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the natural-rights argument for slave resistance reconcile with these thinkersâ acceptance of empire and racial hierarchy?
- XREF: This nuance complicates the standard âEnlightenment = libertyâ narrative that figures like GrĂ©goire and Raimond deploy elsewhere.
Related
- European intellectuals framed abolition as a choice between reform and violent slave revenge (similarity 0.84)
- Enlightenment abolitionists warned that emancipation had to precede and preempt slave revolt (similarity 0.84)
- Colonial thinkers recognized slave resistance and planter repression formed an escalating cycle (similarity 0.82)
- Leading Enlightenment abolitionists also produced racist ideas (similarity 0.78)
- Enlightenment thinkers argued slaves had the right to violent resistance (similarity 0.78)